


Aching

by akane42me



Category: Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akane42me/pseuds/akane42me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just tell me where it hurts. Your secret's safe with me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aching

**Author's Note:**

> Written in May, 2008 for a mfuwss beta challenge.

**Aching**

A low pressure front crept in last night. Pretty soon they’ll be heading this way. The way rats come down the stairs in front of a fire. Yeah, yeah, don’t get all righteous on me. I know they’re not rats. But the way they sneak in here, even the ones retired from the field, working in the labs now, or Intelligence, or wherever else they’ve managed to land, they never lose that skulking thing. It‘s creepy. I turn around and there they stand, with their rusty bones, their aches and pains. Especially when the weather changes. The low pressure makes their injuries ache. Old age, knocking at the door two decades early.

Pain is a warning sign. Ignore it at your own risk. Okay, they don’t exactly ignore it. What they do is, they mask it. They take pain killers. It makes things better for a while, but sooner or later something’s going to fall apart. And they know it. They’re painting over rust. Bad move. You have to get at the source of the rust and fix it, or it keeps getting worse, rotting out from under the shiny new paint. But doing it right takes time. They don’t have time. That’s what they tell me. Just give them something for the pain and out they go, until something breaks or tears and they have to go to the hospital or rehabilitation. Till then they come here, to the dispensary. My name’s Al Turion. I hand out the pills.

We get all kinds of pain in here. If it’s not too bad, I give them some glorified aspirin and out they go. Otherwise, they get to go inside to medical and come back with a prescription. Of course, there’s a form. The pain assessment form, with its sorry rendition of man’s cruelty to man. Throbbing. Shooting. Stabbing. Gnawing. Sharp. Burning. Aching. Heavy. Tender. Splitting. Exhausting. Excruciating. The form goes in their file, one for every visit. They don’t like that. They don’t like to talk about the pain, and they really hate pieces of paper with their signature on them, all lined up in a file folder for a medical review board to get the wrong idea about. The next thing they know, they‘re sent down to the minors, working security detail, or housekeeping, or riding a desk somewhere in Timbuktu. They take their pencils and draw obscene looking genitals on the human figure printed next to the chart, where they’re supposed to put an X where it hurts. They cross off the adjectives and write in their own. Which I will not repeat here. Bottom line? No paper, no pills.

\---

Solo and Kuryakin came in this morning. They put on a Heckle and Jeckle act, but this was not weather-related, and we all knew it. Kuryakin said he didn’t need anything, he was only making sure his partner got here. Solo said he was really all right, but he sort of ached all over. I asked him what from, but Solo wouldn’t say and I handed him the form. Solo made a face. Kuryakin told him it shouldn’t be much of a stretch for him to fill out. Solo smiled a little.

Kuryakin said, “Maybe if you rack your brain it will come to you.” Solo scowled and got busy with the pencil. “Don’t get peevish,” Kuryakin said, “I’m merely pulling your legs.”

“It’s leg, one leg,” Solo said.

“Edith pulled both of your legs,” said Kuryakin. Solo raised his eyebrows at him and shifted his eyes in my direction. Kuryakin shrugged and scooted out the door.

I got it. Half the time, they come straight in here after a mission and they don’t have the thing declassified yet. Solo held out his hand. I held out my hand. He put on a sheepish grin and handed me the form. I looked at it. An ache. In one knee. My ass. I handed him a travel tin of Anacin. He dropped it in his breast pocket and patted it, then put his finger over his lips and said, “Shhhh.”

I laughed and supplied my half of the routine. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

He left, still smiling.

\---

I remember the first time he shushed me. He wasn’t smiling then. A winter storm was brewing and the front stalled. The barometer dropped and hung there, heavy and low. You’d think low pressure would make you feel easy, because the pressure’s low, you know what I mean? But for three days it felt like New York City was being crushed in the vise grip of the universe.

He walked in looking distracted, stressed. I’d been wondering how long it would take him to show up. All the regulars had been and gone, long gone. I gave him the form. “You know the routine. Tell me where it hurts.” I automatically pulled out the bottles of aspirin, Anacin, and APC tablets and put them on my desk.

He said, “Actually, I was hoping you could find a little something to help me get to sleep.”

“Oh man, Mr. Solo,” I said. “You gotta see the doc for that.”

For a second, he looked trapped. He made a soft noise in his throat that sounded like a strangled laugh. He balled up the pain assessment form and threw it at me. I almost snagged it from the air, but I was caught off guard and missed it. I had to scramble down on the floor to scoop it up, and when I straightened up, brushing the dust from my knees, he was watching me with a flat look that made me realize he purposely overthrew it. Then he turned his mouth into a curve and I was looking at a shark.

“Don’t tell me that,” he said pleasantly. He pointed his finger and thumb at me like a gun, and waved it around, pointing at the cabinets lining the walls. “I’m sure you must have some sample packs in here somewhere, Al,” he said. Al. Like I’m his best friend now.

“What, are you going to rob the drugstore? Ha, just kidding,” I said, but he was making me nervous as hell. He ignored me and circled the room, opening cupboard doors and drawers, fingering aside the bandage boxes and reading labels on pill bottles. He picked up the coffee pot and sniffed its contents. When he turned around to face me, he still had the coffee pot and his face had a look on it that made me move back a step. I got this crazy idea that he was going to throw it at me. He took a step toward me and I moved around to the other side of my desk, to put something between us. “Mr. Solo. Take it easy. Just tell me where it hurts.” My voice cracked, it actually cracked.

He came at me in a slow glide, his eyes never wavering from mine, and stood in front of my desk. The closer he got, the farther back I one-stepped till the back of my knees hit the seat of my chair and I fell into it, but not before my butt cheek caught the armrest and I almost tipped over with it. While I righted myself and the chair I noticed the cubby space under the desk and I thought about how I could duck down there if he came at me. When he made a move toward me from across the desk, I jumped, and it took me a full second to register the fact that he was pouring coffee into my mug with the big letter ‘A’ on it. He returned the coffee pot to the burner, came back and sat on the edge of my desk, toying with the pages on my calendar. Then he picked up my coffee mug and took a little sip. I relaxed and took a good look at him, now that I felt pretty sure he wasn’t about to karate chop me or pull any of that weird shit they do to hurt people, and I finally noticed the dark circles under his eyes.

“How long has it been since you had a decent night’s sleep?” I asked him, consummate professional that I am. He sat there and glanced at me, flipping some more pages of my calendar while he sipped coffee. That’s when it dawned on me. I knew that look. Oh, yeah. I see that look every fucking morning lately. When I shave. And in her eyes, when she gives me one of those dry, hard-lipped kisses on her way out the door, before she goes to her secretary job for Mister Hot Shot Brad Nagel the Pharmaceuticals Sales Manager who’s Going Places in this World with his custom leather briefcase and wingtip shoes and doesn’t wear a boring white lab coat with a boring pocket protector for his boring job that makes him look like Poindexter. Yeah, I could see how he needed help getting to sleep.

On impulse I said, “You want to tell me about her?” Way to go, Mr. Psychology Today. Butt right in on Mr. Solo’s personal life. Next time, engage brain before mouth shifts into gear.

I think it surprised him. He straightened up and looked at me, curious, like he was seeing me for the first time. He swallowed some more coffee and his eyes locked onto mine with an unvarnished intensity so unnerving I nearly looked away, but I held on. He didn’t answer me. But here’s the deal. He didn’t deny it, either. I couldn’t stand it anymore and started talking for both of us. “Sleeping pills aren’t going to fix it, Mr. Solo. Believe me, I know. There’s no pill that’s going to fix it, maybe it needs a fresh start, it needs time, it -”

“Shhhh.” He put his finger to his lips and shushed me, I thought, because I was going on like a blithering idiot. I shut up.

“You know, I really can’t talk about this,” he said softly. He nodded, like he was trying to convince himself. He hesitated, and it got so quiet I could hear the second hand ticking on my watch. Then something, some last thing, fell from his face and after a moment he said, “If I could talk about it, I’d tell you where it hurts.” He pointed at his chest. “It hurts like a son of a bitch.” His eyes fell on the wadded form I’d dropped on the desk and he pulled it open, smoothing the wrinkles from its center to the edges.

“Throbbing. Shooting. Stabbing.” He ran his hand over the paper again and again while he talked his way through the words printed there. “Gnawing. Sharp. Burning. Aching.” He held the paper up and turned it over, cocking his head, like he couldn’t find what he was looking for. “Like something’s broken. But there’s nothing in there to break. There can’t be. I won’t allow it.” He dropped the form into the wastebasket on the side of my desk, leaned over, and whispered in my ear, “So let’s not talk about where it hurts. Let’s just agree that I should fall asleep tonight, okay?”

I felt my tongue drying out as I breathed in for what felt like the first time in two minutes, and I realized my mouth was hanging open. I must have looked like a moron. He pulled in a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and the old familiar Mr. Solo was back. He gave me a thump on my shoulder with his fist and stood up. He said, “I guess I’ll have to lay off the coffee and settle for these.” He took the bottle of Anacin from my desk and headed for the door. At the last second, he turned and put his finger over his lips again and said, “Shhhh.”

I said, “Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me,” as he walked out.

“Hey - wait, those have caffeine in them.” I hurried after him, but he was already gone. I really didn’t plan on trying to stop him. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. How dumb was that? I can’t believe I said it.

\---

I’m not privy to a lot of things around here. But over the years, I’ve learned to pick up information about where they’ve been, even when it’s classified. Sunburned faces in the middle of winter. Frostbitten fingers in July. Things like that. And I sit next to the secretaries in the lunchroom. That’s where I heard the names, a couple of days later. Whispered, all serious like, not twittering like they usually do when they talk about him. Terbuf. Clara.

When I heard it, I got no satisfaction from the knowledge. I learned all I needed to the day his mask slipped, the one that looked like mine. The day I learned we’re not so different - me, a Poindexter in a lab coat and him, a Hard Guy with a gun. Two guys with an ache on a cloudy day. Aching for someone who doesn’t love them anymore.

Somehow, he knew that I’d heard about her. Maybe he saw something in my face the next time he came around to the dispensary. I don’t have much of a poker face. We’ve never spoken of it.

When he hands me the pain assessment form and says “Shhhh,” and I answer, “Your secret’s safe with me," we both know there’s nothing more to say.

 

The End


End file.
